About the Good Housekeeping Institute

Over 100 years of history!

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Sep 1, 2011

The Good Housekeeping Institute (GHI) is the foremost consumer product-evaluation laboratory in the country. Located on the 29th floor of the LEED-certified Hearst Tower in New York City, GHI evaluates thousands of products for Good Housekeeping magazine, goodhousekeeping.com, and for the Good Housekeeping Seal and Green Good Housekeeping Seal. In its six labs—Health, Beauty, and Environmental Sciences, Textiles and Paper Products, Nutrition, Kitchen Appliances and Technologies, Home Appliances and Cleaning Products, and Consumer Electronics and Engineering—GHI engineers, scientists, and other experts use state-of-the art equipment and feedback from consumer testers to evaluate all types of consumer products, including moisturizers, vacuums, TVs, smartphones, sheets, towels, and much more. In GHI's famous Test Kitchen, culinary pros create, taste, and triple-test the thousands of recipes that appear annually in Good Housekeeping magazine, on goodhousekeeping.com, and in Good Housekeeping's cookbooks.

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At GHI, product safety, quality, and value are always top of mind. When evaluating products for editorial review, GHI experts put safety, performance, ease of use, durability, design, as well as customer service to the test. If a product presents a safety hazard, it automatically fails. In order to earn the Green Good Housekeeping Seal a product must first earn Good Housekeeping's primary Seal (meaning that it's backed by Good Housekeeping'stwo-year limited warranty, promising a replacement or refund up to $2,000 if a product becomes defective). Our evaluation looks at everything from ingredients, materials, and composition to energy, water, and waste reduction in manufacturing processes to reduction in packaging, and much more.

Lab testing in the Good Housekeeping Institute

Briana E. Heard

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Today's consumers are faced with a glut of products that make a huge number of claims. They know they can turn to GHI to find what to trust…and not. GHI has had a long and impressive history of consumer advocacy, from championing the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 to today. GHI was responsible for the largest bicycle helmet recall in history and our flammability tests of Halloween costumes led to major recalls as well. We've warned consumers about children's sleepwear and winter blankets that failed to meet the voluntary standards on flammability and have been involved in the mission of making toys safer for many decades.